


home we steer, a merry crew

by Casylum



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 14:02:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13055451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casylum/pseuds/Casylum
Summary: "Come on, Kendry," Dutch says, "It's not like I'm asking for state secrets, or whatever it is the Nine's decided are important enough to get smoked by backwater mercenaries in the defense of, I'm just asking why you were on Ch'angali-VII.""The savings," Kendry says dryly.





	home we steer, a merry crew

**Author's Note:**

  * For [celer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celer/gifts).



> >  
>> 
>> _And now our tale is done_   
>  _And home we steer, a merry crew,_   
>  _Beneath the setting sun._   
> 
> 
> — _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ , Lewis Carroll
> 
>  
> 
> For [celer](http://archiveofourown.org/users/celer) for [Yuletide 2017](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2017).
> 
> Thanks to [mckoi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mckoi) for providing her patience and excellence as a beta.

Delle Seyah Kendry, matriarch of Land Kendry and subtle heavyweight of the Qreshi Nine, is in a bit of a bind.

Not a political one, which she could've dealt with with her eyes closed, or a moral one, which she'd never experienced in her life, but a literal one, the rough material used to tie her wrists and ankles currently digging into her skin. To add to the indignity, the sharp points of whatever godsforsaken wooden chair (or chair-like item, she's not sure whatever she's tied to has ever seen the inside of a woodshop, let alone sandpaper) are doing their level best to stab her wherever she's been foolish enough to have skin.

Part of the blame, if she's being honest, lay with her: if she hadn't been on Ch'angali-VII—for reasons that were, of course, entirely above board and had nothing to do with spending a great deal of time and effort to get a rise out of one frustratingly fascinating Killjoy—she wouldn't have been unceremoniously whacked over the head and tied to a chair in the least accommodating place imaginable, outside of the blasted hellscape of Arkyn.

The only consolation to this entire situation is that her erstwhile RAC agent (the sometimes Yalena Yardeen, always Dutch-the-Killjoy) is tied up right next to her, matching splinter-trap of a chair and all.

Dutch, however, due to some luck of previously applied force or general exhaustion (Delle Seyah has no idea what the woman gets up to when she's not making her life difficult, but she can only assume that it's dirty and tiring), is still knocked out.

Which, to put it mildly, simply will not do. Kendry's been awake for what she can only assume is hours; there's no clocks, no windows, and no accommodatingly obsequious kidnappers prone to gloating to weasel the time out of.

Delle Seyah has places to be, people to see, arms to gently and ever so subtly twist. She doesn't have even a little bit more time to spend here playing Kidnapped: Colonial Era, no matter how quaint it may seem in the retelling.

"Dutch," she hisses, after taking a good look around to ensure their captors had left them alone to enjoy the luxury of the synthcrete pit they're currently inhabiting. "Dutch, wake up. I refuse to bear this alone."

No response. Delle Seyah rolls her head back on her shoulders, loosening the stiff muscles of her neck before twisting to the side to eye the distance between her and her—she shudders to even think this, but here they are—cellmate, and judges the potential risk worth it.

"Yala," she says, in the dialect she'd learned specially for this (though she'd rather hoped Dutch would be awake for it), "Yala, I need you. Wake up."

Silence. Delle Seyah sighs, and slumps in her restraints.

Dutch comes awake in the next second with a snarl that echoes around their current prison, snapping Delle Seyah's spine straight with the shock of going from almost no noise to this. There's an anger there that Delle Seyah's rarely seen, one backed by fear and memories, rather than Dutch's usual cocktail of righteous outrage and general provocation.

Normally, Delle Seyah would be...irked at the fact that anyone managed to get her to jump, but then the teeth that snap at the air by her face miss by a mere hairsbreath, and she decides that a little jumpiness is well deserved, not to mention that the long string of invective that comes after them leaves her in the rare position of being almost impressed.

"Dutch," she says, in her family meeting voice, taking advantage of the pause caused by the other woman's need to breathe. "Dutch. There's no time for this."

Dutch blinks and chokes back the beginning of a scream. Then: "Kendry? What are you doing here?"

"Not important," Delle Seyah says dismissively.

Dutch narrows her eyes, ready to fight, then: "Why—Where in the hells are we? And why—" she strains against against her bonds, her face slowly shifting from confused and outraged to outraged and calculating "—why are we tied up?"

"Would that I knew, Killjoy," Delle Seyah says, relieved that Dutch is awake and getting down to the business of problem solving and not wanting to admit it, "but unfortunately our hosts haven't been the most...forthcoming."

"Haven't killed us, that's a plus." Dutch looks around the cell, seeing the same thing Delle Seyah's been staring at for the last few hours: plain synthcrete walls streaked with water stains, shoddily constructed chairs, lighting and electric fixtures that look like they were installed before Delle Seyah's grandparents were born, a crumbling metal staircase climbing its way up the walls into the gloom overhead, and an increasingly threatening grate in the floor that looks far too shallow to save them if their captors decide to turn this into a cistern rather than a prison cell.

"Is it, though?" Delle Seyah muses, looking sidelong at Dutch. "I would've thought you'd prefer me dead, no matter the circumstance."

Dutch snorts, and Delle Seyah can feel the muscles of her arm flexing against her own. "Dead, no matter who it is, is a hassle. I can deal with you alive, and Johnny can shoot you later."

"So long as he shoots me somewhere clean, I don't much care," Delle Seyah says.

She can just see the edge of a smile on Dutch's face, but can't tell if it's because of what she said or because, in the next few seconds, Dutch has managed to wrest her left arm free of her restraints.

~~~

Dutch had had plans for today.

Ch'angali-VII is an older station, a collection of pre-fab asteroid miners fused together in a twisting maze of knee-knocker lined corridors and synthcrete modifications. She's solid, for all her haphazardness, personified on the wall just inside the docking bay as a stout, motherly looking woman, dark skin streaked with Lethian mud, looking up towards the freedom of the stars. Station residents are predominantly hard working laborers taking a second to make something for themselves, rather than fueling the endless drain of Qreshi land reclamation projects, making Dutch predisposed to like them, and by extension, the station they call home.

It's why her plans, the great ones, the ones that involved hot baths, good food, and staying as far away from politics—RAC, Qreshi, or otherwise—as she physically could, the ones she's now missing, had been for a stay on Ch'angali-VII instead of remaining on Westerley.

Instead, she'd gotten the hard plasteel butt of a pulse rifle to the back of the head, and a double-date to the nearest available shithole with none other than Delle Seyah Kendry.

Who still isn't telling her why she'd been anywhere near Dutch (who'd been hunting down the best possible deal on a mani-pedi-deep muscle massage combo at the time of her abduction), let alone close enough for them to be snatched as a package deal.

"Come on, Kendry," Dutch says, working at the ties on her right wrist, having already freed her left. She's trying very hard not to think about the fact that the way they're placed—so close that her right shoulder brushes Kendry's left—means that her face is currently six inches away from Kendry's own.

"It's not like I'm asking for state secrets," she continues, "or whatever it is the Nine's decided are important enough to get smoked by backwater mercenaries in the defense of, I'm just asking why you were on Ch'angali-VII."

"The savings," Kendry says dryly, breath huffing lightly across her cheek, and Dutch barks a laugh.

"Sure, sure," she says, bending to work on the restraints tied around her ankles once the rope falls away from her arm, not mourning the loss of close facial proximity with Kendry at all. "As if the Nine would set foot on station, let alone for something they can get at home for free."

"Mmm," Kendry hums from above her, in the way that means Dutch isn't getting any more out of her, not unless she's willing to give a little in return.

Seeing as Kendry's version of "giving a little" edges hard into soul selling territory, Dutch isn't quite ready to go there.

(Never mind the voice at the back of her mind that says Kendry would take something else in payment, something that Dutch probably wouldn't mind giving her at all, if she didn't know it came with knives and molecular disassemblers attached.)

Dutch works in silence for a minute, cursing whatever knot artist their captors had hired to the Hells and back. "Do you know where we are, though?" she asks finally, fingers worrying at the rough edge of the ties.

"You mean aside from Hell, or the closest human approximate?" Kendry's voice is dry as dust.

"That's Arkyn, anyway," Dutch volleys back, before letting out a soft whoop as the ties around her ankles come undone.

"Point," Kendry concedes. "But I'm afraid we're nowhere so quaint. Can't you hear the sublight engines rumbling, smell the recycled air? We're still on Ch'angali-VII, probably in the original pre-fab section."

"And you know so much about this station's architecture because..." Dutch lets it linger, not necessarily because she thinks she'll get an answer, but because she wants Kendry to know she's on to her bullshit.

Kendry, typically, refuses to acknowledge it, and instead says, in the most imperious voice possible for a woman dressed in wrinkled clothing and cursed with a head of frazzled hair, "Now that you're free, untie me."

If Dutch were smart, she'd say "or what". If she were smart, she'd leave Kendry there, until Kendry decided to donate some answers to the cause of Figuring Out Why In The Fuck They Were Abducted.

Instead, she smiles wide, leans down just inches from Kendry's face, and breathes, "Say please."

~~~

Pawter Simms—not Seyah, no matter what the crumpled piece of paper on her dresser says—doesn't know why she's here.

Wait, no, that's a lie, she knows exactly why she's here: Johnny Jaqobis had blinked his baby blues and asked her pretty, pretty please with a cherry and a bottle of hokk on top if she'd help him and D'av pull Dutch out of the latest hole she'd fallen into, and more fool her, she'd said yes.

"I didn't expect the hole part to be quite so...literal," she hisses down the comm, and Johnny's laugh buzzes warmly through the transceiver on her neck.

"Trust Dutch to find the most ridiculous set-up in the Quad and then expect us to follow her into it." That's D'av, laughing and calm and in control, such a far cry from the wise-cracking shell of a man she'd first met that it's almost spooky. He's at home here, in the middle of a job, Johnny and Lucy in his ear, Dutch a hop-skip-and-a-jump away, all of them knee-deep in trouble and loving it.

Pawter almost feels left out, except she can feel the thrum of excitement under her skin, the one that's not quite like the thrill of jakkbliss, but oh-so-close. She thinks, _I could get used to this_ , and then, _Better not, better not, watch yourself Simms_.

Being around the-Jaqobis-and-Dutch is dangerous, she knows that. They make her want things, with their free living and fierce loyalty, things she couldn't have before, and now can't ever, not since she watched her own mother shatter on the floor in front of her.

"Pawter, you're coming up on it," Johnny says, cutting through her thoughts. "Get ready."

"Aye aye," Pawter says under her breath, and then rearranges her face into something pleasant and not quite bright. She approaches the oblivious and obviously very bored guard standing at the door to what Johnny assures her is the place where Dutch is being held, smiling her very hardest.

"Hi," she chirps brightly, batting her eyes and doing her best to look up at the guard through her eyelashes. It's hard—the guard is almost a foot shorter than she is—but she does her best. "Can you tell me where the powder room is?"

"Ma'am," the guard says, and Pawter can feel her throat seize, reflexively preparing to correct them. _It's Seyah_ , her mother's voice whispers in the back of her mind, and Pawter simply smiles all the harder in response.

"Yes?" she asks, and almost laughs as the guard flushes red around the edges.

"Ma'am, you can't be here, this is a secure facility," the guard says, then: "Powder room?"

"Uh-huh," Pawter says eagerly, "The nice person out front—grey hair, dark eyes, very scary expression—"

"Commander Vraydon?" the guard interjects, and Pawter nods vigorously, fighting off a smile. She had, indeed, had a chat with the Commander, one they were currently sleeping off in their office.

"Mm-hmm—" and Johnny's laughing in her ear, just absolutely losing it "—they said that I'd be able to find the powder room down this way, and I was just so grateful, you know, because I've been on a shuttle for what feels like ages—"

Pawter keeps blathering on, getting the guard to nod along when she asks the most inane questions she can think of, slowly moving them further down the hallway, away from the door, the guard turning towards her in sympathy.

Five minutes later, hey've built up a rapport: Pawter's guard is named Srivala, comes from a mining station in a different quadrant, and took this job to support her wife and kid.

"We want to open a bakery," Srivala confides in her, and Pawter winces internally, already regretting what's going to happen next.

"That's lovely," Pawter says, trying to shove all of her remorse into one expression while at the same time bringing her hand up to slam into the side of Srivala's neck, the tranquilizer in the set of silver rings she's wearing working quickly enough that Srivala doesn't even have the chance to look betrayed before she falls to the ground.

"Target down," she says, before crouching down to pull Srivala off to the side of the corridor and prop her up against the wall.

"That's my girl," Johnny whoops in her ear. "Now, can you get the lock open on that door?"

Reassured that Srivala's as comfortable as someone can be with enough tranquilizer to fell a Hullen coursing through their veins, Pawter takes a moment to inspect the lock.

"Looks almost Colonial, Johnny, no electronics anywhere," she says, squinting to make sure there haven't been any internal upgrades.

Cosmetically, fooling a thief into believing they're dealing with analogue over tech is a great first line of defense, but she's also worried along more practical lines: if she starts poking around a full-tech lock with solid metal lockpicks, she's liable to shock herself back to pre-Flood Qresh.

"Lucy says she can't pick up anything in the sector where you are," D'av chimes in. "Or, at least, when it comes to any kind of locking mechanism."

Seeing as Lucy is rarely wrong—and how Dutch-the-barely-solvent managed to afford an AI/ship combo that advanced she'll never know—she takes it as proven fact and pulls the thin packet of lockpicks from inside the lining of her shirt.

"So once I get in—," she starts, before the hard grind of un-oiled metal against metal drowns her out. The door swings open at the same time, forcing her to take a quick step back, her arms coming up instinctively in the way Johnny and Dutch taught her, tense and ready.

"So good of you to come and pick us up," Delle Seyah Kendry says smugly, with a pointed eyebrow at Pawter's raised arms.

Pawter drops them with a grimace, only entertaining the thought of punching her in the face for the briefest of moments.

Kendry smiles widely, as if she knows exactly what's going through Pawter's mind, and steps through the doorway as if she fully intended to be here, rumpled clothes, botched kidnapping and all.

Dutch, hair in a tangled halo around her head, rolls her eyes in commiseration as she follows behind.

**Author's Note:**

> The original ask for this was: Pawter, Dutch, Kendry, emotions, and maybe a threesome. I think I took a little bit of liberty with the definition of 'emotions' (and 'threesome', for that matter) but I hope you enjoy! Happy Holidays!
> 
> Some further notes:
> 
> Ch'angali is Georgian for 'fork', please shower me with awards for my naming prowess.
> 
> Does the Quad have a Colonial period? I assume so. Are they as fond of analogue tech in that verse as I am? Probs not.
> 
> Can Pawter pick locks? She can now. Can Dutch? Probably. Can Kendry? Obviously.
> 
> In terms of timing, take this as taking place in the same universe as the show proper, but with a few key differences: Pawter's alive, Aneela's not really in the picture, Delle Seyah is, well, Delle Seyah, and the whole issue with the RAC, the Hullen, and Westerley is taking a bit of a backseat.


End file.
